Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Boston Linux VIRTUAL Meeting reminder, tomorrow, Wednesday, May 21, 2025 - Securing the Gnu C Library

When: May  21, 2025 7:00PM EDT (6:30PM for Q&A)

Topic: Securing the Gnu C Library

Presenter:  Benjamin P. Kallus

Location: Online: https://meet.jit.si/blu.org

Meeting will be recorded, but not live streamed. Recordings will be
posted: https://blu.org/video/

Summary:

An analysis of security of the glibc heap

Abstract

Ben discusses his work on securing the Gnu C library, and reviews how
the allocator works, talks about how its structure makes it exploitable
in some circumstances, and explores some of the hardening patches he's
submitted and how they fix some of these problems.

Ben has previously given talks at BLU on Differential Fuzzing
(2024-01-17) and Reproducible Builds and Deployments with NixOS
(2022-10-19).


Links:

https://blu.org/cgi-bin/calendar/2022-oct
https://blu.org/cgi-bin/calendar/2024-jan
https://kallus.org/
https://web.cs.dartmouth.edu/people/benjamin-p-kallus


For further information and directions please consult the BLU Web site:
http://www.blu.org

Our meeting recordings are found on the Video tab: http://blu.org/video/

--
Jerry Feldman<gaf.linux@gmail.com>
Boston Linux and Unixhttp://www.blu.org
PGP key id: 6F6BB6E7
PGP Key fingerprint: 0EDC 2FF5 53A6 8EED 84D1 3050 5715 B88D 6F6B B6E7

_______________________________________________
Announce mailing list
Announce@lists.blu.org
https://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Boston Linux VIRTUAL Meeting , Wednesday, May 21, 2025 - Securing the Gnu C Library

When: May  21, 2025 7:00PM EDT (6:30PM for Q&A)

Topic: Securing the Gnu C Library

Presenter:  Benjamin P. Kallus

Location: Online: https://meet.jit.si/blu.org

Meeting will be recorded, but not live streamed. Recordings will be
posted: https://blu.org/video/

Summary:

An analysis of security of the glibc heap

Abstract

Ben discusses his work on securing the Gnu C library, and reviews how
the allocator works, talks about how its structure makes it exploitable
in some circumstances, and explores some of the hardening patches he's
submitted and how they fix some of these problems.

Ben has previously given talks at BLU on Differential Fuzzing
(2024-01-17) and Reproducible Builds and Deployments with NixOS
(2022-10-19).


Links:

https://blu.org/cgi-bin/calendar/2022-oct
https://blu.org/cgi-bin/calendar/2024-jan
https://kallus.org/
https://web.cs.dartmouth.edu/people/benjamin-p-kallus


For further information and directions please consult the BLU Web site:
http://www.blu.org

Our meeting recordings are found on the Video tab: http://blu.org/video/

--
Jerry Feldman<gaf.linux@gmail.com>
Boston Linux and Unixhttp://www.blu.org
PGP key id: 6F6BB6E7
PGP Key fingerprint: 0EDC 2FF5 53A6 8EED 84D1 3050 5715 B88D 6F6B B6E7

_______________________________________________
Announce mailing list
Announce@lists.blu.org
https://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

Friday, May 2, 2025

Boston Linux and Unix InstallFest LXXII Reminder, tomorrow, Saturday May 3, 2025 Umass Boston

When: Saturday May 3, 2025, from 9:30 am to 5:00 pm EDT
Where: UMASS Boston. CS CCS Conference Room 3rd floor McCormack Building
a short walk from The Campus Center.

Park in the Campus Center garage or take the UMASS shuttle bus from the
JFK/UMass station on the MBTA Red Line. This bus goes to The Campus
Center. Please see https://blu.org/cgi-bin/calendar/2025-ifest72 for
more detailed directions and maps.

What you need to bring: Your computer, monitor, power strips and your
Linux distributions. We do have copies of some distributions.
In general we have expertise with most distros, but if you need special
expertise, please email the BLU discussion list in advance. Today, most
distros are using Live images that you can try out and then install.
This can be copied to DVDs or USB sticks.There are a number of USB
creators, such as UNetbootin (https://unetbootin.github.io/). Both
Fedora and Ubuntu have a USB creator built in.

COST: It's free! However, we DO have expenses, and contributions are
welcome. Please consider contributing $25 per machine. UMass Boston
students and faculty no cost.

Our volunteers will help you to install Linux on your own system. While
Linux runs on most systems, some systems do have configurations and
hardware that may not be supported. Please consult the following web
pages for hardware compatibility. While we prefer you to bring your own
distros, our volunteers will normally have

         Linux Howto Pages: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/howtos.html
         Linux Frequently Asked Questions: http://tldp.org/docs.html#faq
          Additionally, there are forums and listservs for most distros.

Generally our volunteers have sets of the latest Fedora, Ubuntu, and
Mint distributions on Live USB.
         * Fedora - https://getfedora.org/ (Fedora 42)
         * Ubuntu - http://www.ubuntu.com ( 24.04LTS or 25.04)
         * Linux Mint - https://linuxmint.com/ (22.1)
         * other distros can easily be downloaded at the Installfest

We generally have them on local drives and can burn USBs.
Since there are many variants of these distros, we advise you to
bring an empty USB stick with sufficient memory to hold one of the
distros. Live images require about 1.5GB. I usually have some USBs
prepared or can easily burn a USB.

We usually have both a Wired and Wireless network available.


Additionally, you can run Linux on your Windows PC through a virtual
machine manager, such as Virtualbox. You can install this in your
Windows machine and run Linux as a guest OS, or install it in your Linux
machine and run Windows as a guest. Linux has a built-in virtual memory
system, but you can also download and install VirtualBox 6.0
(http://www.virtualbox.org) which is free and is available for Linux,
and Windows


Please refer to the BLU website (http://www.blu.org) for further
information and directions.

--
Jerry Feldman<gaf.linux@gmail.com>
Boston Linux and Unixhttp://www.blu.org
PGP key id: 6F6BB6E7
PGP Key fingerprint: 0EDC 2FF5 53A6 8EED 84D1 3050 5715 B88D 6F6B B6E7

_______________________________________________
Announce mailing list
Announce@lists.blu.org
https://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/announce